Our survey continued by asking about the financial aspects of an ABM strategy and the technologies deployed, if any.
ABM investment is up
Spending on ABM has definitely increased this year. When asked what percentage of the marketing budget is allocated to ABM, almost half (49%) selected up to 25%, with a further 9% choosing the 26–35% segment. The statistical average of 33% is three percentage points up on the 2019 survey. The question on the marketing team’s time and effort returned a similar trend: the statistical average of 36% is four points up on the 2019 figure.
61% of the respondents recognised that these numbers have grown in the last 12 months, while 35% said they saw no change.
What technologies are used for ABM
One key question that is always discussed in context of ABM is: ‘Do you need to buy technology?’ ABM became important when digital marketing was gaining traction. Indeed, suddenly, about five years ago, a cacophony of ABM-related content, claims and products exploded – most of them centered on programmatic advertising and predictive analytics. At the same time, many marketers adopted an ABM strategy and many leveraged their existing marketing automation or even CRM systems to achieve their objectives.
We asked about the technologies currently used for ABM and offered a total of 13 different categories, including (perhaps a little provocable) ‘nothing (not even CRM)’. The survey respondents could select all that applied and the distribution is telling. The vast majority continue to use their incumbent CRM or marketing automation platforms to run ABM. One-fifth of them say they have deployed a retargeting system, while 10% have an intent platform in use. 17% leverage an external data service for contact data enrichment, and a similar number leverage sales insights providers for the same reason.
ABM technology maturity is earlier-stage
When asked the maturity question about technology deployments specific to ABM, just over half (53%) admitted that they were still considering and scoping their investment plans. Another 33% have bought and are now implementing their selected technology, though not necessarily new technology. 11% are even improving their technology usage for ABM.
Most valuable technology players Out of curiosity, we also asked the open question ‘Which is your most useful piece of tech for ABM and why? Please state the platform name’, and received lots of interesting answers. Six vendors specifically were named by a multitude of respondents and therefore earn a most valuable player (MVP) recognition.
Confirming the above comments, the MVP award from the 2020 ABM survey goes to Salesforce. A clear secondplace for MVP was earned by HubSpot. Both of these CRM systems were well ahead of several followers, led by the vendor brands Marketo and Bizible (Bizible belongs to Marketo, both of which belong to Adobe), and then the pairing of Demandbase and Engagio (Demandbase acquired Engagio earlier this year).
A few other vendors got one or two citations each, including ABM stalwarts, such as 6sense, Lead Forensics, Madison Logic and Triblio. But the list is nowhere near the more extensive and bewildering population of ABM vendor names regularly listed by research companies like Forrester or Gartner in their technology evaluations.
Key insights on ABM technology
- Let us be clear. ABM is first and foremost a strategy. It initially needs to be agreed as such across the company with the necessary organisations and processes set up. Then, it is implemented across all aspects of marketing and sales, including digital marketing, where the technology described in this report can be applied.
- There may not even be an ABM software market as such. ABM is currently the most-used promotional acronym by marketing software vendors, with well over 90 software vendors claiming to provide ABM-specific functionality. But, as we have seen, there are probably several dozen more with no ABM claims, but being used by B2B companies to market to specific accounts with targetmarket segmentation and content personalisation.
- The current mire of confusingly-positioned vendors will converge to a few important platform providers supporting all, or most, of the ABM-related processes, such as: account and contacts selection; analytics and insights; content personalisation; customer engagement orchestration; and performance assessment. Many businesses currently deploy two, three or even four ABM vendors, with integration an issue.
- Reflecting on the multiple choice answers listed above, and looking at the MVP comments, we can assume that some 20% of companies have invested in specialised ABM software functions, such as retargeting, analytics and data sources. The rest get by using only their existing marketing platforms.
